Psychological Anthropology Final Exam

Clifford Geertz

a critic of ethnoscience and structuralism. He wanted to move away from psychological anthropology

modern cultural anthropology is not doing _________

Science

Claude Levi-Strauss

ethnoscience and structuralism went into the head and tried to deduce symbols and that is what culture is, but they need to learn the logic of everyday social life.

Clifford Geertz criticized ethnoscience and structuralism for being too _____, ______, and too _____

abstract; suspiciously ordered, contained

Geertz definition of culture

humans create culture, you can look at culture in the way culture is external to the person. Watch human behavior and culture and interpreting it

Geertz explains cultural symbols as

extrinsic and outside of the person; extra-personal mechanisms of perception, understanding, judgement, and manipulation. provide a blueprint for social and psychological processes

interpretivism

engaging in interpretation

thick descriptions cons

interpretations are different for everyone

thick descriptions

detailed account of social actions to interpret human interactions

Geertz saw humans as a

non-exsitent, save for the capacity to have culture and thus to be regulated by culture

Sperber suggested a view of culture as __________

distributions of representations in a human population, ecological patterns of psychological things

Dan Sperber

broad thinking researcher; created the law of epidemiology of representations

Sperber’s Law of Epidemiology of Representations

in an oral tradition, all cultural representations are easily remembered ones; hard to remember representations are forgotten, or transformed into more easily remembered ones, before reaching a cultural level of distribution

Sperber argued that the most interesting cultural knowledge is _______

tacit knowledge

tacit knowledge

not directly taught, learned through personal experience and observation; people just know it

Pierre Bourdieu is best known for the concept of _______

habitus

habitus

the typically unconscious patterns of posture, speech, dress, and mental habits shared by people with a common cultural background

Clifford Geertz famously opined that the Western conception of the self is _____________

a rather peculiar idea within the context of world cultures

non-autonomous

they don’t necessarily experience their own actions or emotions as being self-caused, and instead may feel more like a component of a larger group system

non-individualized

they may not even conceive of themselves as individuated from a group. they may see much “we” but little “I”

Central claimed differences non-western selves are

non-autonomous and non-individualized

Melfrid Spiro

anthropologist, did fieldwork with Buddhist monks. he wanted to understand how the doctrine of Anatta (no self) impacted their lives

Melfrid Spiro found that Anatta (no self) played _________ in their lives.

almost no role

it is important not to conflate cultural ideal or normative statements about the _______________.

subject of the self with people’s actual experience and understanding

Uni Wikan claimed that Geertz ________

had the Balinese self entirely wrong

Uni Wikan found that

the Balinese are not concerned with roles and acting because they see the self as ephemeral, but because breaches in etiquette can be deadly

entitativity

the perception that a thing is “entity like” meaning unified, coherent, organized, and difficult to alter

individuals are perceived to have ________ entitativity

very high

Kashima et al. (2005) looked at what?

three East Asian populations and five Western populations

what did Kashima et al. (2005) find?

across all nations, individuals were seen to be more entitative than groups

East Asian countries saw groups as just as _____ as individuals

agentic (capable of being goal directed, being targets of praise or blame for their actions)

universalistic approach

similar seeming mental disturbances across cultures to likely have shared causation

relativistic approach

each apparent mental disorder in its specific cultural context and does not necessarily assume shared causation

culture-bound syndromes

syndromes that are considered psychological in origin and appear culture specific

somatization

when psychological distress is manifested as physical symptoms in the soma

dhat syndrome

a set of locally specific interpretations of a mix of somatization disorders, depressive disorders, and anxiety disorders

Balhara (2011) is known for _______

dhat syndrome

there are cultures where somatization is believed to act as an _____________ where psychiatric disorders are heavily stigmatized

idiom of distress

Cartesian Dualism

mental illnesses may reflect not a meaningful difference in kind or causation, but instead on our own cartesian institutions

mind stuff is different from body stuff

Ruth Benedict suggested what?

that individuals we regard as abnormal may not be regarded as such in other cultures

Shaman

one who may enter dissociative states and be respected for this ability

Shamans have ______ over their trances

control

hearing voices network

a charity that has set out to destigmatize different kinds of hallucinations, including auditory hallucinations

Nancy Scheper-Hughes used a _________ in attempting to explain high rates of schizophrenia in rural Ireland

relativistic approach

Gregory Bateson’s idea of schizophrenia

it is triggered by individuals forced to live with double binds

consciousness

1. meta awareness

2. a stream of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, which are given varying levels of focus

3. a normal waking state

hard problem of consciousness

qualia; personal experience and sensation of the world

why does the mind have a subjective feeling to it

easy problem of consciousness

information processing

an altered state of consciousness

different than the normal functioning from individuals general norms during alert, waking, and consciousness

the most common altered state of consciousness experienced by humans is _________

sleep

sleep

reversible condition of reduced responsiveness, the decreased ability to react to stimuli distinguishes sleep from quiet wakefulness

there are ongoing arguments about wether sleep is _________ to animals

universal

dreams

involuntary visions and sensations that occur during sleep

__________ thought religion itself may have partly originated from trying to understand the strangeness of dreams

Edward Tylor

___________ published what is likely the first text devoted to the dreams of primitive prople. He examined the dreams of Native Americans, Maori, and Aboriginal Australians

Jackson Steward Lincoln

__________ noted that dream interpretation was a societal human universal

George Peter Murdock

_________ conducted an ethnographic study of dreaming among the Hopi of Arizona

Dorothy Eggan

_________ conducted ethnographic work on dreaming among the Quiche Maya of Guatemala. They found a rich and elaborated system of dream interpretation

Barbara Tedlock

________ conducted ethnographic work on dreaming among the Mohave of Colorado specifically the dreams of shamans and those seeking shamanistic power

George Devereux

__________ described the dreaming as a cosmogony, an account of the begetting of the universe, a study about creation.

William Stanner “everywhen”

The Dreaming

Aboriginal Australians have more comprehensive dreams

the accounts of __________ say that during the time of creation, there were ancestral figures who were born of the Earth.

The Dreaming

everywhen

both past and present, it is recalled and re-experienced through ritual

colloquial definition of emotion

emotions are distinct feeling states with consistently associated physiological changes

hypercognized emotions

those that a culture talks about often and possesses a large vocabulary about

hypocognized emotions

those that a culture does not talk about often and does not possess a large vocabulary for

linguistic determinism

languages have different ways of carving up the world and that they may create more words for phenomena they deal with regularly

Robert Levy

discussed the hyper/hypo-cognition of emotions and the distinction was first made in his ethnographic work with Tahitians

Catherine Lutz

studied the emotion among the Ifaluk of the Caroline Islands, argued that the Ifaluk had different emotions and conceptions of emotions than Westerners

Fago

connotes a feeling of sympathy and compassion for the less fortunate or needy

lexical fallacy

the act of mistaking vernacular words for psychological entities

assuming that because we have a word for a feeling, that there is a distinct emotion for it.

cannot assume there is an existent of that word for that emotion

Alan Fiske noted that the lexical fallacy __________

had overwhelmed emotion research in the social sciences: most such research assumed a meaningful and distinct correspondence between vernacular emotion words and internal states

the use of vernacular emotion words means we are ________

importing their moral and performative qualities, which may subtly bias emotion research

Paul Ekman

known for early empirical work on the idea of basic emotions

Early studies of basic emotions had problems, why?

they used static pictures of exaggerated facial expressions to assess emotion recognition across cultures

Some examples of problems with early studies of basic emotions

1. emotions can have associated facial expressions, expressive rather than frozen or exaggerated

2. facial expression can be brief

3. emotions can have key gestural components

4. emotions can have vocal components

music

the intentional and expressive combination of sounds and rhythm

George List

ethnomusicologist; believes the only universal aspect of music seems to be that most people make it

Samuel Mehr et. al.

set out to test both the universality of music and the universality of its basic structure

The Natural History of Song

the goal was to gather information about vocal music around the world; found that 100% of 315 societies have music, good evidence that music is a societal universal

HRAF

a database of ethnographies

Mehr et. al. set out to build two databases:

1. NHS Ethnography

2. NHS Discography

NHS Discography

118 field recordings (expanding to 1,007 in later analyses) covering 30 world regions. This academic resource analyzes global songs across four social contexts: lullabies, love songs, dance music, and healing songs.

statistical analyses of the NHS Ethnography reveled that descriptions of musical events vary consistently along three dimensions:

1. formality

2. arousal

3. religiosity

the two explanations about why humans spend precious energy on activities that appear divorced from evolutionary fitness

1. musical behavior is a byproduct of brain systems that we never designed to create or listen to music

2. musical behavior is a product of brain systems that were designed by evolution to create and listen to music in a way that serves a fitness-relevant purpose

proposals for human behavior

1. infant care

2. mate bonding

3. group cohesion

trivial

the inciting event was an insult, a petty argument, or a small amount of owed money

culture of honor

a set of group norms that treats small disputes as contests for reputation and social status

Dov Choen

known for experimental work on the culture of honor among white male southerners in the United States - asshole experiment

what are some suggested explanations that the South or more violent than the North?

1. higher temperature

2. poverty/economic situation

3. the history of slavery in the South

herding

where herdsmen needed to resort to force to protect their property because law enforcement was weak or difficult to come by

lax talionis

the rule of retaliation

the South is higher in homicides than the North only with respect to homicides resulting from _______________.

arguments and interpersonal conflicts

What did Cohen et al. find?

Southern male students reacted more negatively and more aggressively to being bumped than Northern male students

pluralistic evidence

individuals mistakenly think that others hold a different opinion than they do